How can one understand 348 billion hashes per second? The testing was used on a collection of password hashes using LM and NTLM protocols.

I chose to start with a set of unsalted MD5 hashes because the MD5 hash function was built for speed -- which means that basic MD5 hashes are also easy to crack (and are generally not recommended ...

Hashcat is a popular and effective password cracker widely used by both penetration testers and sysadmins, as well as criminals and spies. Cracking passwords is different from guessing a web login ...

For instance, a password made of 13 numbers would take the graphics cards 3 years to crack, but add in just one more number and that rises to 28 years, then add another and it rises to 284.

If the password is strong enough, the hash can’t usually be cracked, since the more secure a password is, the more difficult it is to crack.

Researchers are using words from classic novels to crack the LinkedIn password hashes ...

What’s to be done? The Password Hashing Competition is the brainchild of a group of leading security and cryptography experts, including some leading figures in the online password cracking scene.

But those 6.4 million unique hashes posted on a Russian password-cracking forum in June 2012 only accounted for a fraction of the total LinkedIn database.

Other password hacking techniques Brute force is just one of many methods hackers use to crack passwords, which is why it’s so important to use a different long password for each of your online ...

Kevin Young, a computer security expert who studies passwords, is nearly at a loss for words. Literally. Young and his colleagues are working to decode some 2.6 ...